The Eleventh Hour

A beer festival is like a big potluck dinner … That kind of reminds us of Homer’s advice to Bart: “Son, a woman is like a beer. They smell good, they look good, you'd step over your own mother just to get one!” Anyway, we were saying festival, potluck etc … The point is, one thing you want to know about a festival is who’s bringing what.

Well, we’ve got some answers, albeit a partial list, but it can help you navigate Saturday’s 11th Annual Garden State Craft Beer Festival aboard the USS New Jersey.

We’re not going to go into the how-to’s of festival tasting, i.e. beer styles to start with before working your way to heavier styles. Or remind you to keep up your water intake. A lot of that’s been covered in the past by so many other beer writers. (Think back to Don “Joe Sixpack” Russell’s take last March before the Philly festival.)

Plus, so much about beer – flavors and favorites, ales vs. lagers – is as individual as an iPod, so we’ll just say what we know about the beers that'll be going into your logo’d commemorative tasting glass. (A barrel-sized thanks to the brewers – many of whom were up to their elbows in prep work for the festival – for fielding our emails and calls asking for their beer lineup.).

So here’s what we know:

The Brewpubs

• Tun Tavern (Atlantic City):
The Tun has a new brewmaster, Tim Kelly, who invites you to check out some Devil Dog Pale Ale and the Tun’s summer staple, hefeweiss. Tim also promises to have something else to wow the festival crowd with.

• Pizzeria Uno (Metuchen):
Make your bock maibock, says Uno’s brewer Mike Sella. His golden bock (7.2% ABV), fashioned with Hallertauer and Saaz hops, is among a flight of beers that includes the brewpub’s year-rounds Ike’s IPA, Gust N Gale Porter, plus a dark mild.

• JJ Bitting (Woodbridge):
Like lager? Like a dark lager? Still like a lager when it goes goth? We do. And we’ll be looking for this schwarzbier, Bitting’s Black Magic. (Totally tangential trivia: The USS New Jersey was launched in 1942, the same year that christened the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer tune “That Old Black Magic,” a song that would go on to chart for boatloads of singers, including Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Louis Prima.) Other brews Bitting will have in tow: Bierstrasse Hefeweizen, Bitting’s Best Bitter and J.J.’s Raspberry Wheat.

• Long Valley Pub and Brewery (Long Valley):
If you, like the USS New Jersey, call South Jersey home, chances are you haven’t been to Long Valley. It’s worth the trip up, for both the brewpub and the scenic part of Morris County the pub draws its name from. In the meantime, brewer Joe Saia is sending a crew to Camden to share some Lazy Jake Porter, a gold medal winner at the Great American Beer Festival. Rounding out Long Valley’s N.J. festival lineup is Grist Mill Golden Ale and an IPA that cuts an English jib.

• Harvest Moon (New Brunswick):
It doesn’t take a Rutgers math major to figure out an IPA that has Hops2 (that's squared) in its moniker means you’re in for an exponentially hoppy drinking experience. The equation here is German hops + American hops + English varieties for dry hopping = Harvest Moon’s Hops2 Double IPA. Brewer Matt McCord plans to have enough of the IPA on hand so hopheads, and anyone else with an adventurous palate, won’t be denied. Ditto for the casual beer drinker.

The Production Breweries

• Cricket Hill (Fairfield):
Co-owner Rick Reed once told us he thinks a well done American lager is a style that's becoming a little bit forsaken. Perhaps that’s why the Cricket has one, aptly named East Coast Lager, a refreshing brew that has found a niche in our fridge. Look for it, plus their American Ale, Hopnotic IPA (another one of the Cricket’s that is usually in our fridge), and the Colonel, that is, Colonel Blide's Altbier.

High Point Wheat Beer Company, aka Ramstein (Butler):
What’s that old saying, that bit of advice for success, “Do what you do best …” Well, High Point’s name says it all: Wheat Beer. Greg Zaccardi used to work as a brewer in southern Germany, and took a lot of that Deutschland bier ethic and sensibility back home to create some great German style wheats and lagers. Look for Ramstein Blonde, High Point’s take on the traditional unfiltered weiss, and Ramstein Classic, a dark wheat that beer writers 10 years ago dubbed the future of dunkel wheats. See for yourself how that claim holds up.

• Flying Fish (Cherry Hill):
The Fish is the big fish when it comes to Garden State craft beers, and will probably crack the 10,000-barrel mark this year. We remember when they were just starting to swim and recall the Saturday open house in October ’96 when the mash was struck for their very first Abbey Dubbel. Fish folks say they’re bringing a bit of everything to the festival. We hope that means HopFish, their really creamy and tasty IPA, in addition to their ESB and quenching Farmhouse Summer Ale (which we turned our neighbors onto).

Festival Details

Admission: Tickets are $35 and still available online through ticketweb.com or at the ship's ticketing office, 856-966-1652 x107. Price includes keepsake tasting glass and self-tour of the battleship.
Entertainment: Music by the Cabin Dogs.
Food: Vendors will sate your appetite for the right price (seriously, there will be stands where you can buy food).
Parking: Garage is located at the Camden waterfront complex; shuttle buses will be available to the battleship.

A shot – not so long now – at beer fame

They call him ESB Dave.

Dave Pobutkiewicz (pronounced POE' • but • KEV • ich) picked up that nom de bière thanks to his two-year quest to clone Fuller’s marquee brew.

It helps, too, that the initials for extra special bitter distinguish him from several other Daves in his homebrewer club, the Defiant Homebrewers, who meet at Defiant Brewing Company just across the state line in Pearl River, N.Y.

But if you ask what his favorite beer style is, ESB Dave will tell you maibock, or helles bock, as beer aficionados also know it.

“There’s so much challenge to making a light-colored, full bodied beer,” says the 39-year-old from Pompton Lakes in Passaic County who has homebrewed for 11 years.

Now, Dave has another reason to enjoy a helles bock. His interpretation of the style scored him a berth in the finals of the 2007 Samuel Adams American Homebrew contest.

With that honor, Dave – who’s one of two finalist from the competition’s Boston regional judging – and finalists from the San Francisco and Chicago regionals get an invitation to the Great American Beer Festival (Oct. 11-13) in Denver.

That’s where Boston Beer Company will announce two winning homebrewers, whose beers will be brewed by Boston Beer for the next Samuel Adams LongShot variety pack.

A third homebrew, from the Samuel Adams employees contest, will be chosen to round out the nationally distributed sixpack through voting by attendees at the GABF.

(The variety pack is made up of two bottles of each beer. The current variety pack, featuring brews from the 2006 winners, includes an old ale, a Dortmunder style export and a boysenberry wheat ale.)

Boston Beer’s brewmasters, beer judges from the Beer Judge Certification Program, and other qualified judges put their palates and noses to good use to select the finalists. The company announced the final four from the more than 1,700 entries last Friday.

Dave found out a little earlier in the week in a phone call from his homebrewing compadre, Chris Baas of Midland Park in Bergen County, who entered an alt and kölsch in the contest. (Chris' alt finished in the top 10 of the Boston regional judging, by the way.)

“He said are you sitting down, Sam Adams just called me,” Dave says, describing what he thought was the introduction to a bittersweet moment: his losing and Chris setting his sights on Denver.

But it was the other way around. Chris was calling to inform and congratulate his friend.

Chris, a finalist in a separate Samuel Adams’ homebrew competition last year, shipped both of their entries to the Boston judging – just a day before the mid-May deadline. But he didn’t have Dave’s phone number handy, so he listed his own as the contact. When the Boston Beer folks called Chris, they were actually looking for Dave.

Chris describes his friend as a "meticulous brewer" whose toughest critic is perhaps himself. "He’s so critical of his own beers. He doesn’t make flawed beers. We all keep telling him his beer is good," says Chris.

Dave, a service technician who helped install the coolant lines at Defiant Brewing ("I'll work for beer," he jokes), says he almost didn’t have enough of the bock to enter. The 5-gallon batch – tweaked and refined from a previous take on the bock – was so good, he came close to finishing it in the month or so before the contest deadline. The Sam Adams folks would need seven bottles; Dave got down to eight, cutting it that close.

Dave and Chris, who’s also a beer judge, are no strangers to beer competition.

Chris has been in the winner’s circle in Best of Brooklyn and other contests. Dave has watched his own brews, such as an imperial stout and Belgian strong ale, finish in the top three. He also took a first place in New Jersey State Fair competition with a hefeweizen, just getting edged out of the best-in-show award.

But right now, Dave’s looking forward, busy compiling the details of his bock recipe and biographical information that Boston Beer has requested.

Not to mention setting his sights on 2008.

About Dave’s maibock
Grain bill: Pilsner malt, light munich malt and a half pound of wheat.
Hops: Spalt and Saaz with IBU in the mid-20s.
Original gravity: 1.070 (17.2° Plato)
ABV: Just under 6.5%
Water: Dave used bottled water in the brew. “My (tap) water is ridiculously hard; I didn’t want to harsh the bitterness with that,” he says.

About Defiant Homebrewers
The club has about 20 participating members and meets the first and third Wednesdays at Defiant Brewing Company (brewmaster Neill Acer) in Pearl River, N.Y., in Rockland County.

Figuratively speaking

Sluggish growth for the big domestic brewers, double digit growth in craft beer. That’s from the Brewers Association earlier this spring, which took a look at supermarket sales from 2005 to 2006 in a snapshot of the nation’s craft beer industry.

The breakdown, according to the trade group, goes like this: 2.4% growth for the big brewers (personified here as Bud C. Miller), while craft beer saw a nearly 18% percent surge in sales. Craft beer is the alcoholic beverage industry’s segment to watch, boasts the Brewers Association.

Given that news, and with Garden State craft beer’s showcase festival coming up June 23rd, we wanted to see where New Jersey’s microbrewers and brewpubs were situated in the industry nationwide, and what the landscape, numerically speaking, looks like for the state’s craft beer business.

The Brewers Association was kind enough to pull together some production stats for us (a million thanks to BA director Paul Gatza, who took the time during a busy spring schedule to whip up the Excel files).

If you’re into figures, then you’ll be well-armed in case there’s a pop quiz at the 11th Annual Garden State Craft Brewers Festival aboard the USS New Jersey. (These numbers probably aren’t going to help you charm the ladies, and spouting them could just get you sucked into a beer geek debate or two.)

So sit back, pour a cold one and crunch some pretzels or Planters, while we crunch the numbers, with visual aids, too! (Some quick points: The stats are drawn from figures reported to the BA by member breweries and brewpubs. New Jersey-specific figures are for the years 2001-06. Also, click on the charts to enlarge them.)

• Top state producer of craft beer: California. That's probably no surprise to anyone who really follows the industry. Golden State craft brewers brewed up 1.3 million barrels (bbls) last year. Rounding out the top five: Ohio, Colorado, Oregon and our foamy neighbor to the north, New York.

California reigns as production king with nearly a half-million barrel advantage over Ohio (859,098 bbls). North Dakota finished last at 550 bbls.

In case you’re wondering (as we were and hence pursued this project), New Jersey came in 29th with 26,384 bbls. (That’s a 2.3% increase from ’05, by the way.) Our neighbors west and south are running laps around us: Delaware (20th) cranks out nearly twice as much craft beer as New Jersey, while Pennsylvania (14th) brews almost 4 1/2 times as much.

• Most disappointing stat (for some reason, this bugged us): Alaska, which in terms of population density has less than one person per square kilometer, compared to our nearly 300 people per square kilometer, is apparently more into craft beer than we are. Alaskan craft brewers made nearly 121,000 bbls last year (for 12th place). Maybe we’re crying in our beer for nothing, but geez we’re on the East Coast, anchored by the metropolitan poles of New York and Philadelphia. Sigh, even Montana finished better than we did, at 64,306 bbls to rank 17th.

We’re not, by any stretch, laying blame on the good New Jersey brewing folks who put the better beer beside our jazzed up steaks, barbecue and hot-off-the-grill dogs and burgers. Jersey is a tough place for any business to be in business. Get into an enterprise that comes with some added regulatory pressure (à la the alcoholic beverage industry) and you can put an exponent on the degree of difficulty. More on this issue at some point soon.

Moving on … Jersey-specific stats

• The Garden State’s top craft brewer is again Flying Fish. The Cherry Hill brewer is closing in on the 10,000 bbl mark (9,785 bbls, a 3.4% percent increase) and dominated the state’s craft beer production for the period observed. River Horse Brewing in Lambertville continues as the place horse (4,750 bbls), while taking show is High Point and its wheat beers. (See the charts for the production trends and the 2005-06 year-to-year micro results.)

• In the subset category of brewpubs, Triumph (Princeton) is tops at 1,310 bbls, followed by Harvest Moon (New Brunswick), 850 bbls. (See the chart for the top six brewpubs.)

• Gone but not forgotten: Heavyweight Brewing. The purveyor of the ever-interesting Perkuno’s Hammer (imperial porter) opted to pack things in last August, with an eye toward popping up on the PA side of the Delaware River in some form. But as beer scribe Lew Bryson has recounted on his blog (with some reminiscing) the Hammer was taken in as a foster child by Victory Brewing in PA.

• Worth mentioning: High Point – aka Ramstein – in Butler and Climax Brewing in Roselle Park were rated among the top 50 craft beers based on user reviews on BeerAdvocate.com (see the June 2007 issue of their hard copy mag). Also, Philadelphia's the City Paper gave top accolades to Flying Fish's Farmhouse Summer Ale in its rating of summer brews.

The Brewers Association is upbeat for 2007’s industry prospects, forecasting the nation's 1,400 craft brewers and brewpubs will top the $500 million sales mark. All stats aside, we’re going to pour another brew in support and follow the BA's lead.

Cheers.

Dark side of the Moon

There’s just something seductive about black. Tell us that a lass decked out in elegant black and trimmed with some well-heeled boots wouldn’t grab your attention and we’d call you a liar. Or dead.

Well we love black and we’re not dead, and those are just a couple of reasons why a beer that dances in the dark caught our eye at New Brunswick’s Harvest Moon Brewery Café.

This is not just any obsidian brew. This raven has lager contours and an accent that’s refreshing, inviting you back for more.

And right now, she can be yours.

Paint it black

This is schwarzbier, that cool German cousin of ale-leaning stouts and porters. It’s a beer style whose most well known example is probably Köstritzer, but Samuel Adams and Saranac have been known to paint it black, too.

Schwarzbier (auf deustch, schwarz = black, bier = beer, duh) traces its roots to 17th century eastern Germany (Saxony). That’s all well and good if you’re fielding questions on “Millionaire” or “Jeopardy!” (Bonus trivia for a college town: Goethe supposedly favored Köstritzer in his stein.)

But we’re talking about a Jersey bar and your glass, so just know that Harvest Moon brewer Matt McCord has chalked up a fourth incarnation of schwarzbier on the pub’s lineup for this spring/cusp-of-summer time of year that usually finds folks returning to the pub at their Belgian wit’s end.

“It’s our summer option for people who want to enjoy a darker beer,” says Matt, whose own palate tends toward English ales, and whose labors have put plenty of stouts and porters of all inflections into the pint glasses of Moon patrons.

Brewed in early spring, Matt styled the schwarzbier with German malts – deriving that deep inky color with chocolate malt and roasted barley – and jazzed it just enough with Czech hops (Saaz), while turning in an ABV of just under 6%.

That’s a little more robust than the typical 4-and-change -to-5% ABV of a schwarzbier, Matt concedes, but his beers tend to run a notch or two higher than what the beer fetishists say is style. And honestly, to drink this beer you wouldn’t know it's elbowing that envelope. Nor would you care since it has an easy-drinking, thirst-quenching quality you’d expect from the lager it is.

So it’s no wonder that among the Moon’s specialty beers, the schwarzbier has earned a following at the establishment, located along a bustling block of George Street just off the center of town.

“Last year we didn’t do it and caught a lot of heat for it. People came in and asked for it, so we weren’t going to make that mistake again,” Matt says.

Doing that would be just plain ... lunacy.

About Harvest Moon:

With 30 specialty beers that can be stirred into the mix of six house beers (including an IPA, America pale ale and a red), plus a roster of seasonals, there’s a lot to like about Harvest Moon. Not to mention the fact that the pub’s within walking distance of the train station, and its growler prices are a comparative bargain at $15 and 10 bucks for refill. (Some brewpubs command $18 before the $10 refill, while others can hit you up initially for $24). On Fridays in the summer, the pub taps a keg of fruit-flavored Belgian wit to feature through the week. Later this summer look for Matt’s take on a saison.

Samuel Smith goes to Washington

We’re coloring outside the lines with that headline, using a British ale to personify America’s microbrewers. But thanks to Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, it’s a turn of phrase that’s too good not to use.

We’re referring to the news that U.S. craft beer now has a seat, or a voice at least, at that banquet of issue-oriented discourse known as Congress. (Yeah, we know, our lofty prose is giving Congress the benefit of the doubt, a huge one at that. But now’s not a time to be cynical.)

The new deal

Two weeks ago (May 15th), 34 members of the House of Representatives, from both sides of the political aisle, caucused on the subject of the craft brewing industry, gathering on Capitol Hill for a confabulation that went something like: “You like beer?” “Yeah, I like beer …” “Me, too …” “What kind?” “The tastier, the better …”

OK, we’re taking license again. But the like-minded reps of the lower chamber – the people’s chamber – did resolve that a prime objective of the House Small Brewers Caucus would be awareness of and education about the niche industry that has returned flavor and creativity to the art of brewing beer in America.

A statement put out last week by the Brewers Association, the craft beer industry’s trade group, describes the mission as providing an interactive opportunity for learning the ins and outs of small business (in this case, running a microbrewery is the small business), the brewing process, and the quality and value of brewing activities.

So what does all this mean? That craft brewers have won recognition for their economic and cultural contributions.

The big picture

The obvious benefits from the industry are some jobs created here, some federal and state taxes or fees paid there. But seriously, the contribution is much bigger, and less matter-of-fact.

For one thing, the craft beer industry is a cultural bridge, and its brewers ambassadors.

Take, for example, the beer styles served up by those small brewers. It’s their global imagination that sends you on a journey, figuratively and literally. Many an American beer enthusiast who has sipped a Belgian ale here has traveled there in search of the genuine article that inspired his local craft brewer. Ditto for the chap in the heartland who signed up with CAMRA and found himself filling a pint to the line as a volunteer at the Great British Beer Festival.

Consider, too, the symbiotic relationship between craft breweries and their communities: Locally grown or produced foods served at restaurants that feature locally made beers. It’s a similar kind of relationship that pairs the Garden State’s annual craft beer festival with the USS New Jersey, retired from decades of decorated battleship service now pulling duty as a floating naval museum. (This year's festival – for a third year – is being held on the New Jersey's decks.)

Politics and beer

It’s worth pointing out that the craft beer industry’s new buddy in Congress is a caucus, not a subcommittee or committee, both of which are much higher on the ladder that is congressional business. But from a practical standpoint, having an organized body to turn to is something to crow about, not to mention a bulwark to keep you from getting stomped on in a competition-crazy world.

Says Charlie Papazian, of the Brewers Association (in the organization’s statement): “There is a very real danger that the voice of the small members of the brewing community may not be heard over that of its larger brethren, so a group of legislators bound by a common interest in the history, tradition and excitement that are hallmarks of today’s small brewers, should help ensure our issues get fair consideration.”

For the smallest of the small, the ones whose involvement with the federal government may be limited to just getting a license and label approval, the caucus may not mean much, says Rick Reed of Cricket Hill Brewing Company. It’s a bigger deal for the brewers who conduct business across state lines. Rick cautions it’s state government that can be the heavier hand.

And in a not-too-business-friendly climate like New Jersey, that’s a whole other story.

FOOTNOTE: There are no representatives from the New Jersey House delegation on the small brewers caucus. (We're not surprised by that.) However, the Garden State's neighbors north and west – New York and Pennsylvania – each have three members.

If you're the lobbying kind, maybe a letter or email to Rep. Jim Saxton will spark an interest; Flying Fish, the state's largest craft brewer, is located in Cherry Hill, and that's a marquee town in Saxton's sprawling South Jersey district. You can probably skip putting pressure on North Jersey reps, since there's a Budweiser facility in Newark, and hence the distinct possibility your suggestions would fall on deaf ears.

Lights, camera, brew!

From the back lot of Beercrafters in Turnersville, NJ, comes an observance of National Homebrew Day 2007 (May 5th) and the Big Brew that took place across the U.S. and abroad.

Thanks to Phyllis Blessing and the rest of the cast at Beercrafters, not to mention all the fine folks who filled our beer glass that day and took the time to be interviewed. (And curses to that damned 8 horse, which broke up our exacta in the Kentucky Derby later on that day.)

QUICK ADDENDUM:
YouTube can make good-quality video look like fuzzy mush, so we're exploring viewer options, which may include linking to video posted on a dot-mac web page in addition to posting on YouTube.

If this ends up the case, you'll need QuickTime player, but it's a free download for both Mac and Windows. (Yeah, we know that sounds like Web 1.0 ...)

ADDENDUM No. 2 (some folks call it PPS):
Here's a viewing option we did find right away: Homebrew Day posted on blip.tv. (The image quality is better if you select the QuickTime format. Blip's conversion to Flash video also looked better than YouTube's reformat. Also, we tried embedding the Blip file, but for some reason it ends up wider than the space allotted.)

ADDENDUM No. 3
The Homebrew Day video is also viewable on Current.tv by clicking here. (FYI: The accompanying text you'll recognize as a repeat of a BSL post, albeit tweaked a little bit for Current.tv.)

Moves at the Tun

A changing of the guard’s on tap at the Tun Tavern brewpub in Atlantic City.

Brewmaster Ted Briggs is heading to Lake Placid Pub & Brewery in the Adirondacks. (Flagship beer: Ubu Ale, an English style strong ale that found favor in the Clinton White House; Bubba liked the brew and had some sent to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Lake Placid was also crowned best craft beer in the Hudson Valley at the Tap New York festival last month, winning the FX Matt and Matthew Vassar Cups.)

Roots

Ted grew up in Michigan and is an outdoorsman. So hunting and fishing in the scenic mountains of upstate New York will be like returning to his roots. His last day is May 15th. Swing by the Tun, have a beer and toast his years of hard work as he hands the mash rake to Tim Kelly, the No. 2 brewer at Flying Fish in Cherry Hill, who’s getting a chance to captain a ship.

Tim takes over May 21st, with the Tun’s hefeweizen as his first beer. And yes, our recommendation is to pop in when the wheat’s neat and inaugurate Tim’s tenure at running the Tun’s 10-barrel, one-person operation, a system he’s familiar with after filling in last year when Ted was sidelined with a knee injury. (The Tun brews about 550 barrels a year.)

“I hope to hit the ground running," Tim says. He notes it's been a year since he's worked on the Tun's system and he'll filter beer his first day on duty.

Incidentally, like Tim, Ted is also an alumnus of Flying Fish (not to mention his stints at brewhouses in Manayunk, Pa., and Michigan), and both he and Tim sharpened their brewing skills first as homebrewers, then through the American Brewers Guild program.

On Thursday, Tun CEO Monty Dahm gave some props to Ted’s service, and looked ahead to Tim’s turn. The Tun’s a brand that has earned its place with “the quality of the beer and we complement that with our food,” he says.

The brewpub’s also evolving, Monty says, with local clientele, tourists, crowds from the nearby convention center and a new shopping district that gives Atlantic City another attraction besides the casinos.

Seven year itch

After 6 1/2 years at the Tun, Ted put his stamp on the brewpub with a great crop of specialty beers and seasonals, plus regularly featured beers like Sterling ESB, American IPA, Leatherneck Stout and Devil Dog Pale Ale (the Tun’s heritage is the U.S. Marine Corps; hence the Semper Fi styling in some of the beer names). To drink at the Tun is to browse Ted’s recipe book.

So he leaves behind a respected body of work. And his decision to move on is about the wider opportunity at Lake Placid, where he'll be one of two brewers.

It goes something like this: Lake Placid started as brewpub before branching out with a production brewery -- Lake Placid Craft Brewing Company in Plattsburgh, N.Y. -- that added bottled beer to its product lineup behind a healthy boost in brewing capacity.

Having both production and pub breweries under one banner is something you can’t do in New Jersey, since the law limits your brewing operation to one or the other. (That never-the-twain-shall-meet restriction is high on the list of dumb-ass beer industry regulations in the Garden State. Sigh.)

But there’s more.

Lake Placid has a reciprocal brewing agreement with Matt Brewing Company in Utica (widely known for its Saranac line of beers). Under the deal, Lake Placid provides pilot brewery services for Matt, which in turn offers some extra capacity for Lake Placid as a contract brewer. Observant drinkers of Flying Fish’s Farmhouse Summer Ale will recognize Matt Brewing as the contract brewer of the Fish’s April-through-August seasonal.

And speaking of Flying Fish, it’s been home to Tim Kelly for the past two years, a place where he worked his way up from the bottling line and cellarman to a spot as assistant brewer behind Casey Hughes.

“It’s quite a privilege to be mentored by Casey and Ted ...” Tim says.

That Tim will be leaving the comforts of the Fish comes unexpectedly and with some sadness, he says. But, proverbially, opportunity knocked with an offer that well serves Tim's ambition -- to have his own brewpub some day.

Arrivals and departures

Tim will pick up where Ted leaves off, initially relying on his predecessor’s recipes but tossing in some of his own beer interpretations soon. (In Tim’s file are his take on doppelbock, English mild, and he’s interested in trying out a tropical wheat beer jazzed up with passion fruit.) Tim also plans to take the Tun's beers on the road, hitting more of the festivals in the region.

(Note: The timing of the transition at the Tun could put a question mark on the brewpub’s appearance at the Garden State Craft Brewers Festival next month. Keep your fingers crossed that the Tun can hustle and make the June 23rd event.)

The Big 1-0

Tim also inherits a big (15% ABV) Belgian ale that Ted brewed to mark the Tun’s 10th anniversary next year. The outgoing and incoming brewers on Wednesday sampled the beer, which still needs some finishing. That process could include dosing it with some active Belgian ale yeast to get the job done. Early ideas for the beer call for it to be racked into 750ml bottles, then corked and capped.

So stay tuned.

One for the brew-it-yourself crowd

This may be the beer version of harmonic convergence …

Come Saturday, thousands of homebrewers -- propane burners, grain sacks and array of gadgets in tow -- will gather at hundreds of sites worldwide to strike mashes and boil hopped worts together in metal kegs repurposed to create beer instead of dispense it.

Then the brewers will raise their glasses to toast the freedom and triumph of because you can …

Welcome to the Big Brew, the spirit and face of National Homebrew Day, a first-Saturday-in-May tradition that collectively demonstrates that from the comforts or confines of your kitchen, garage or backyard you can craft a lager, stout or IPA that’s as tasty as anything Sierra Nevada Brewing makes in Chico, California.

This year is the 10th for the Big Brew celebration; 3,000 homebrewers, whether individually or in beer clubs, are forecast to participate throughout the day and join in a simultaneous toast at 1 p.m. EST.

Some brewers will concoct beers from their own recipes. Others will embrace the unity fostered by the American Homebrewers Association and mash in from the three recipes annually provided by the AHA. (This year’s styles: an IPA, a Belgian strong ale and a doppelbock. For more about the recipes, click here.)

For the uninitiated, the Colorado-based AHA is the umbrella group that champions the hobby that’s been legal in the U.S. since Jimmy Carter tried to outrun the public antics of his brother Billy. (But to be sure, homebrewing goes back much, much further. Pick a historical figure, a person from antiquity even, and you probably have a homebrewer, or homebrew drinker, at least.)

The AHA tracks Big Brew participation and the amount of beer made by urging brewers to register their sites and report the outcome of their efforts. Last year, more than 7,000 gallons were brewed by more than 2,500 participants at 229 sites worldwide, the AHA says.

Here in New Jersey, members of the homebrew club PALE ALES -- that’s a long acronym for lager and ale enthusiasts from the greater Princeton area -- plan to strike six or seven communal mashes (to produce 10 to 15 gallons each) amid the scenic environs of Suydam Farm in Somerset County. The farm is known for dabbling in Jersey-grown hops and has hosted PALE ALES’ Big Brew and accompanying cookout for a few years now.

Among brews planned by the club, says member Andrew Koontz, is one they’re calling Mondo Roja, a lager (or ale, depending on whatever yeast type folks ultimately elect to use) in the mold of Mexican beer Negra Modelo. The choice is a nod to the fact that Homebrew Day falls on Cinco de Mayo this year.

To that end, the PALE ALES gang will also sip on some margaritas and plans to whip up some mint juleps, since the Kentucky Derby -- the more renown first-Saturday-in-May event -- also takes place on Homebrew Day.

Farther south, in Gloucester County, you’ll find the back lot of homebrew supply shop Beercrafters a beehive of brewing activity.

Look for a monster mash of 200 pounds of pale malt to be struck about 8 a.m. From that will come 90 gallons of wort to be divvied up among brewers, who’ll customize it with specialty grains they’ve steeped separately. Yeast donated by Flying Fish, Iron Hill and Triumph Brewing will await the boiled-then-chilled worts to eventually transform it into the guest of honor, beer.

Big Brew has drawn as many as 500 homebrewers to Beercrafters, but folks there say the turnout is always hard to predict.

If you want to come, you’re welcome, but please remember it’s a demonstration not a festival. So bring an interest in brewing, not merely a thirst.

Save that for the toast to because you can.

Kilobrew update

Long Valley Pub and Brewery has put the word out: Batch 1,000 Brewmaster's Reserve makes its drinking debut in just 10 days.

Recap: This is the imperial stout the Morris County brewpub created to mark the kilobatch milestone (and had forecast putting on tap last month; but hey, you can't rush a good thing).

To that endeavor, Long Valley brewmaster Joe Saia really dressed this beer up before portioning three barrels into cold conditioning in steel tanks and another four into bourbon barrels for some white oak styling. And with the special handling comes a staggered, one-barrel-at-a-time release of the brew.

Quoth the pub about their 9% ABV raven beauty: "Batch 1000 is an Imperial Stout whose stark, jet black body is topped with a deep toffee colored layer of foam. Its robust flavor is made up of dark chocolate, dark fruits, and blackstrap molasses. The malty sweetness of this stout is balanced by an abundance of caramel, chocolate, and roasted barley that lend themselves to a lengthy burnt, bittersweet finish. "

Come the evening of Friday, May 11th, Joe will ceremoniously make the first pour of Batch 1,000. When this barrel is gone, you'll have to wait awhile for the next release.

The beer, after all, is named Brewmaster's Reserve.

Word to the weiss

Some notes from Atlantic City and the Tun Tavern …

Look for the Tun to rotate its Summer Weiss into the line-up sometime in June.

This is an annual brew from the gambling mecca’s only brewpub, located at the foot of the Atlantic City Expressway, across the street from the city’s busy convention center.

Brewmaster Tedd Briggs says the beer will continue in the German style of hefeweizen, but will eschew the traditional clovey or fruity hallmarks of the style. The brew will be “well balanced,” Tedd says, charting at about 4.5% ABV.

It will also be a brew that takes well to some apricot or raspberry flavoring, an addition that helped it attract a wider following when the Tun poured the Summer Weiss at last year’s Garden State Craft Brewers Festival along the Camden waterfront.

Tedd plans to return to the decks of the USS New Jersey this year (June 23rd) with the wheat beer, and maybe some brewer’s reserve surprises up his sleeve for the 11th incarnation of the festival. (Stay tuned.)

The Tun’s weiss is expected to run the duration of the summer. But Tedd is also looking at turning in a Belgian wheat to take up a tap handle along side the Tun’s mainstays of Sterling ESB, All American IPA, Leatherneck Stout and Irish Red.

About the Tun

Military historians will recognize the name “Tun Tavern” as the birthplace of the U.S. Marine Corps. The 18th century Philadelphia watering hole was where troops were marshaled to suppress uprisings by indigenous tribes, and most famously where two battalions of Continental Marines were recruited in November 1775 as the American Revolution was taking shape.

If you want to find the original Tun Tavern, drive along Interstate 95 through Philadelphia and somewhere along the way look down because the location is multilane pavement now. There is a replica at the Marine Corps’ museum at the corps’ base in Quantico, Va.

And then there’s the Atlantic City brewpub, which salutes the corps with a Semper Fi and some iconic tributes throughout the bar and open-kitchen style restaurant.

You’ll find no less than seven beers on tap created with the Tun’s 10-barrel brewing system, as well as Bud and Coors Light on tap and Corona in the bottle to satisfy the more mainstream beer tastes. (Unlike a lot of brewpubs, which chiefly draw their base clientele from their surrounding areas, the Tun pours beer in a gambling resort that attracts millions of people annually. Translation: The brewpub has to serve a wide range of palates.)

Top-selling beer -- Tun Light (4.7% ABV); fan favorite -- All American IPA (6.5% ABV), a hoppy and assertive but not overwhelming session take on the India pale ale style.

Throwing your beer a curve, Part 2

The taste-test results are in.

That new, curvy Samuel Adams pint glass won’t make your favorite Jersey-brewed beer taste like champaign.

It will, however, help the beer taste more like what it was intended to, complementing the flavors and aromas of malt and hops. But a word of warning to you fans of big beers: The glass seems to wreck their flavor profile. More about that later.

A quick recap:

Boston Beer Company created this tulip-meets-shaker pint glass for its flagship Boston Lager after some R&D by some topnotch beer palates and technical minds. Folks at Samuels Adams stick to their proviso that the glass is intended for their lager’s malt profile and Hallertauer Mittelfrüh hops.

Fair enough -- their glass and their beer. (Their marketing, too.) But we suspected what’s good for their lager could be good for our bitters.

So we put the glass through the paces, pitting it against the sturdy and bar-ubiquitous shaker pint glass, enlisting the sensory help of Flying Fish head brewer Casey Hughes and two of his crew -- brewer Tim Kelly and cellarman Frank Winslow. The Fish’s brewing operations chief, John Berardino, also popped in with some observations.

(Note: Both John and Casey were skeptics. John: Looks too much like a vase and its undulations rob the beer of a uniform appearance when held up to light; also looks tough for bars to clean quickly and slip back in their rotation. Casey: Chatter about the glass sounded like a lot of hype; wonder how it stacks against a Chimay glass …)

For the test bench, the Jersey brews sampled were: Cricket Hill’s East Coast Lager, Climax Brewing’s Extra Special Bitter and Flying Fish’s HopFish India Pale Ale.

Carrying things out a few more decimal places, so to speak, we also tasted a great, 8% ABV whiskey barrel-aged version of the Fish’s Belgian Abbey Dubbel. (And we can't wait to leisurely sip this baby again.)

The findings
Generally speaking, the Sam Adams glass topped the shaker pint, providing:

• Cleaner malt and hop aromas
• Readily noticeable malt flavors (unlike an initial bitterness you got drinking from the shaker pint)
• An overall support for the delicate flavors of the beers

Yes, these are the pretty much the same claims Boston Beer makes about the glass. But it’s what we tasted and what we found to be the case.

Another observation: Your palate won’t tire with the Sam Adams glass. For that, you can credit a laser-etched ring on the bottom. It triggers a constant stream of CO2 bubbles over the life of the pint to produce aromatics. (Chimay’s Belgian beer glasses have similar etching to create the same effect.)

Now, about those high-gravity beers ... The shaker glass and its wide V-shape proved friendlier to the Fish’s dubbel, holding the alcohol-warmed malt flavors and fruity aromatics in a tighter integration of pleasing sensations.

Not so with the Sam Adams glass.

It slammed the nose and palate with the booze, a jet stream of alcohol heat that shut out the vanilla notes that should have come from the oak barrel aging. The alcohol in that dubbel is a flavor that should do more weaving and less sensory cleaving. (For comparison sake, we also sipped an Old Ale from Sam Adams’ LongShot sixpack and got pretty much the same impression from that 10% ABV beer.)

Overall, says Casey: "For what the glass was made for, it does very well and complements a variety of beers ... styles that are hoppy and malty but don't have the extreme alcohol."

And, just for kicks …
On our own, we put the Sam Adams glass through a separate test, using River Horse Brewing’s ESB, Flying Fish’s Farmhouse Summer Ale and a black and tan made from Guinness and the Fish’s summer seasonal.

The results were largely the same as with the first round of sampling. But the black and tan was really interesting, a blend of Guinness tang swirling with Summer Ale tang and a tinge of its malt sweetness, all up front but nicely giving way to some slightly muted hop flavor in the Summer Ale. (The head was kind of cool, too, a tan-against-white froth. And by the by, the Summer Ale was excellent by itself in the Sam Adams glass.)

So why all the fuss over a pint glass?
Because beer has such a range of flavors that it deserves some an attention toward capturing and enriching those flavors. Plus, matching the proper glass to a beer is a common practice in Europe.

As it should be here, too.

NOTE: We're not going to offer a buying recommendation. But we will point out the glass is priced at $30 for a set of four, with shipping to New Jersey and tax boosting the grand total to nearly 41 bucks.

Throwing your beer a curve, Part 1

There’s something about beer in a glass.

It’s inviting and relaxing, mesmerizing almost, as it settles beneath a foam crown, bubbles rising.

It’s a siren in the classical sense.

So when we heard Boston Beer Company (aka Samuel Adams) was shaking up the reliable pint glass, giving it the heave-ho in favor of a new 16-ounce model styled for its Boston Lager, we were suitably curious.

After all, the sturdy, simplistic shaker glass is practically the icon of poured beer. It blew the chunky, workhorse mug of our fathers’ generation off the bar years ago to become the alpha glass.

But this new Sam Adams glass … it has starlet curves. And we wondered if it would make the shaker pint a Sony Walkman in an iPod world.

For some answers, we turned to Boston Beer.

And happy to explain what was on their minds by commissioning the design, engineering and manufacture of the glass was brewing manager Grant Wood (a different Grant Wood, but an American artist in his own right, albeit in the media of malt and hops).

With a dozen years at Boston Beer, Grant has a hand in the 20-plus beers produced under the Samuel Adams brand. So he knows beer.

And if he’s not practicing what he preaches -- drinking what he’s brewing -- he may be inclined to sip a Belgian beer, a lambic perhaps. So he does peer through the bent-back tulips, so to speak, to see how the other half lives (if you don’t mind a Beatles metaphor).

That said, two of our key questions to Grant were:

Our old friend, Shaker Pint, you got a problem with it? (Pardon the phrasing, but this is New Jersey, you know.)

And …

If the new glass is good for a Boston Lager, what about a Princeton brewpub porter?

Second question first.

Grant says the new glass -- a fusion of the shaker pint and the tulip glass typically associated with some Belgian beers -- was indeed tailored for the Boston Lager, its malt profile and noble hops. Even among Samuel Adams’ stable of brews, the new glass is the province of the Boston Lager.

So, we surmise that for Garden State beers, we’re on our own, and our mileage is probably going to vary.

And to our other question, Grant says there’s no problem with the shaker pint. It has done quite a functional job at the bar. But …

“You can do better, and I think we proved that with this particular glass,” he says.

The devil is in the details. And that’s where the difference between curvy newbie and shaker pint comes in, Grant says. It’s the nuances of flavor and aromatics and how and when you encounter them. Smell then taste, sweet before bitter, and a dynamic in which that can continue over the life of a pint. (Smelling is a compass for the taste buds. The nose knows, and it delivers more than half of your flavor sensations.)

Some test tasting zeroed in on the shortcomings of other glassware.

The shaker pint wasn’t well suited for capturing aroma. “Especially when you get to the bottom of glass,” Grant says. Pilsner glasses and their tall V-shapes were worse, generating a lot of bubbles and allowing the beer to warm quickly. They were like chimneys “and aroma wafted away faster,” he says.

But the new glass -- Grant confesses he was an early skeptic -- and its somewhat double-goblet shape offered a different experience.

When you sip from it, he says, the rolled tulip lip fits to the mouth and puts the beer to the front of your tongue, so you taste maltiness, that sweet before hop bitter. (Reminder: He is referring to drinking a Sam Adams Boston Lager.) And, Grant says, he anticipated hop aroma, but the new glass also provided enhanced malt aroma. (Remember, the nose knows and the importance of that.)

The glass is also laser etched on the bottom, some engineering work that keeps feeding bubbles. The result is sustained beer aromas. (We’d like to reiterate that nose comment.)

It should be noted that Boston Beer wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just create a glass for beer drinkers that brings out the best in its best-known brew, a “next step to bringing them to beer nirvana,” as Grant says.

He hopes the glass is something for other brewers to look at, perhaps consider, even if it’s just across beer culture.

So maybe it’s not autumn for the shaker glass after all, just a nice set of curves set on the bar that can make one beer better and beer in general more fun.

And for us …

Accepting what Grant and others at Boston Beer say about the new glass and the beer it was designed for (and we’ve enjoyed a Boston Lager from it), we’re still curious about how a Jersey ESB or IPA would fare within its contours.

Stay tuned. We’re going to find out.

NOTE: Boston Beer is providing the new glasses to its better draft beer accounts nationwide. So you could see it show up in the rotation at your favorite bar. It's also for sale in sets of four from Boston Beer (check their website), so you don't have to return to those days of slipping your server a sweeter tip so she'd look the other way as you swiped a glass.

Kilobrew: The Brewmaster’s Reserve

This is where the sidewalk ends for session brews and you start thinking about beer as a dessert companion.

Deep, rich and full, Joe Saia’s Batch 1,000 Brewmaster’s Reserve Imperial Stout could be a great aperitif. But Saia thinks it just may be the perfect partner to chocolate raspberry cheesecake.

You’ll be able to make that call yourself very soon.

Sometime this month Saia, brewmaster at Long Valley Pub and Brewery, will put a round of the beer on tap to mark the 12-year-old Morris County brewpub’s 1,000th brew.

Exactly when it goes on tap, well, Saia is leaving that news to break on Long Valley’s website, so keep checking.

Is he being cagey? Not at all. The touch of mystery is just the way things are with a Russian style stout that stirs great expectations and gets some royal pampering.

Brewed earlier this year in the pub’s seven-barrel system (217 gallons) and clocking in at 9% ABV, the stout hit the fermenter two months ago.

Right now, three barrels-worth (93 gallons) are cold-conditioning at 32 degrees. The rest of the batch -- destined for some classy table-side presentation -- is enjoying an extended stay at slightly warmer temperatures in white oak bourbon barrels that Saia picked up from the Buffalo Trace Distillery.

The charred oak that autographed the Kentucky whiskey’s flavor profile will do similar magic for Saia, imparting some caramel and vanilla notes in the stout (brewed with Warrior, a Pacific Northwest hop, at the lower hopping rate you’d expect for a stout), not to mention a hint of bourbon flavor.

And the word reserve in the stout’s name … Well, that’s not just talk. Saia does plan to methodically portion out this beer that’s rich enough for a czar and looms large like the domes at St. Basil's.

The oak-aged portion will go into 1-liter bottles for ordering not unlike a bottle of wine brought to your restaurant table. Look for that to start happening after mid-June. (Remember, this is New Jersey, and Long Valley is a brewpub, so you can only get the beer at the brewpub.)

The cold-conditioned portion of the batch will get rotated onto the bar taps in between the pub’s seasonal brews, so its availability will be a little longer.

Royal treatment. Indeed.

About Long Valley Pub and Brewery
Nestled in a bucolic part of Morris County at the foot of Schooley's Mountain, the brewery and restaurant are housed in a restored two-century-old barn constructed from fieldstone. (Settled by German Protestants in the 1700s, Long Valley -- part of Washington Township -- was once known as German Valley, so named because the scenic surroundings reminded its inhabitants of their ancestral home.)

The brewpub is a top tourist draw in Washington Township, where the craft beer takes its place beside artisanal foods, antiques stores and art shops.

Beers: Saia brews an array of English style ales, including German Valley Amber Ale, Long Valley’s Best Bitter, Long Valley Nut Brown Ale and Lazy Jake Porter. The latter two charmed the judges at the Great American Beer Festival, winning gold medals in 2005. Saia’s seasonal beer offering includes an Irish stout poured under nitrogen (kudos for that) and brewed with a Guinness touch to give it a signature tang.

Collective reasoning

Bottles, openers and trays, oh my.

If you’re one of the legions of beer drinkers who sees a budding art collection in brewery advertisements, bar towels and empty cans, then this event is for you.

The Garden State Chapter of the Brewery Collectibles Club of America is holding its spring swap on Sunday at the Polish Cultural Foundation in Clark (in Union County).

It’s one of three gatherings the club holds each year to give collectors a chance to buy, sell or trade brewery memorabilia (breweriana, as it’s known), from neon signs, sports programs, glassware and coasters to trays, tap handles and clothing emblazoned with brewery names and logos.

And don’t forget the humble can or bottle, testaments to the evolution of how beer is packaged and served. Some beer cans – like rare, pre-World War II containers – can fetch handsome sums (read thousands of dollars).

(Special Jerseyana note: Many a beer enthusiast knows canned beer was born in the Garden State in 1933, from a union between the American Can Company and Newark’s Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company. Beat that, red Bass ale trademark triangle.)

The April show is expected to draw collectors from as far as Pennsylvania and Connecticut and could feature as many as 60 tables from traders, many who are members of the BCCA’s Jersey chapter.

The organization’s treasurer, Scott Manga, says the two larger shows – a kickoff show in January and an Octoberfest show in the fall – pull in collectors from as far north as Massachusetts, as far south as Virginia, and Pennsylvania from the west. Those shows are two-day affairs, held in conjunction with the Jersey Shore BCCA chapter.

If you go
Where: The Polish Cultural Foundation, 177 Broadway in Clark.
Time: From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Trader fees: $12 for Garden State BCCA chapter members, $15 for non-members. Admission for walk-ins and guests 21 or older is $5.
On tap: Climax Brewing’s Hoffmann Helles, Magic Hat (Vermont) Fat Angel and beer from J.J. Bitting Brewing Company brewpub in Woodbridge.

(Special thanks to outgoing Garden State BCCA president Terry Scullin for the photos.)

Double duty

When Dave Hoffmann mashes in at his Roselle Park brewery, his mind could be down the shore.

He’s not thinking about beaches and boardwalks, mind you. More like he's immersed in some forward thinking.

That’s because the younger half of the father-son duo that creates ESBs and IPAs under the Climax Brewing brand also creates some come-back-for-more beers as the brewer at Basil T’s Brew Pub & Italian Grill in Toms River.

Doing double duty means Dave spends as much time planning as he does brewing to impart distinctive signature flavors to his Climax styles and to likewise make the beers that flow from the serving tanks at Basil’s have unique qualities of their own.

Up north, Dave recently finished bottling and kegging his Hoffmann Helles and is planning to revive a cream ale he last brewed about three or four years ago; 60 miles down the Garden State Parkway, a quite inviting doublebock earned plenty of fans during a quick run at Basil’s. It’s gone now, but a nut brown ale should be pouring in its place later this month, and a maibock will appropriately be ready at the beginning of May. Also for Basil’s, Dave just may stir a helles into the mix.

Rounding out the lineup at Basil’s-Toms River is Dave’s take on a red ale; a West Coast pale ale that’s hoppy and citrusy without going over the top (“it’s all about balance” is a phrase you’ll hear Dave say often); and a pretty killer chocolate oatmeal stout. (OK, it was really killer.)

From Roselle Park, look for the cream ale under the Climax banner in mid-May. (Dave’s ales take "Climax" in the name, while his lagers carry the familial Hoffmann stamp.) For the cream ale, he'll use some cara-pils malt for added body and the signature creamy texture, without letting loose some extra fermentable that would otherwise boost the alcohol content; for the hop profile think Pacific Northwest (Willamette, Mount Hood and Chinook).

And if all that doesn’t keep Dave busy enough and beer drinkers’ elbows bending, he’s got a hefeweizen in the works (favoring the trademark banana-like flavors, but without the clove notes) to also go under the Hoffmann banner. (He may do one in Toms River, too).

The hefeweizen from Roselle Park may not be consigned to seasonal status; so how long the wheat stays around is up to you.

(NOTE: Savvy Garden State craft and pub-brewed beer fans know that two Basil’s dot the Jersey shore landscape: the original Basil’s in Red Bank and the Toms River site. Once under the same brand, they’ve been separately owned for a few years now, sharing only the name. It's slightly confusing, but they have distinct identities, and you won’t go wrong at either location. Great beer, great food. Trust us.)

And Philly Makes Three, Reprised

No more talk, speculation.

Triumph Brewing’s doors are open and taps flowing in Old City Philadelphia.

The stylish brewpub that built a reputation for some great beers in Princeton has been serving to growing crowds in Philly since Wednesday.

On the slate you’ll find eight styles listed, including Triumph’s signatures like Bengal Gold IPA and honey wheat, as well as its gold medal-winning kellerbier (a German style unfiltered lager).

Rounding out the lineup are an amber ale, porter, oatmeal stout, chico ale and a dunkel lager well known at Triumph’s New Hope, Pa., location.

Triumph folks say they’re bullish on the Philly site (on Chestnut Street), and expect to do well in a city where beers of all walks draw legions of fans.

Makes you want to pull up stakes for Old City.

Shore bet

Good news for beer drinkers along the Jersey shore who have discriminating palates.

Fairfield brewer Cricket Hill, purveyors of a quite quenching American lager, have added bottle and draft distribution to Monmouth and Ocean County. As Jersey beer fans, we hope this helps further turn the tide toward the side of taste and choice.

It’s been a month-plus since Cricket Hill widened its reach with its East Coast Lager, amber American Ale and Hopnotic India Pale Ale, the latter being a very enjoyable session IPA (so don’t go looking for the hop hammer to come slamming down. Instead, it's a cumulative hop taste balanced with a not-too-filling full body. No problem standing up two or three of ’em.)

Because of some distribution overlap, Cricket Hill may have already been available in bottles to some shore drinkers. So that means the best news here is the availability of Cricket Hill on draft, which we advocate as the preferred way to have any beer.

You won’t get an argument from Rick Reed, Cricket Hill’s founder, either. Bottling, he says, tends to beat up a beer. The extra handling that bottling necessitates can rough up a beer and change some of its character.

So on that advice, sign up for the draft. And hopefully some savvy and supportive bar owners will help you out.

About Cricket Hill
Founded about five years go, the brewery operates from a former welding shop in an industrial park in Fairfield (Essex County).

Capacity: 3,000 barrels, producing about one-third of that now, with healthy year-to-year growth.

Beer lineup: Besides its lager, American Ale and IPA, Cricket Hill produces the seasonal Paymaster’s Porter (draft only), Colonel Blides Altbier (with plans to bottle that German style offering) and a Belgian summer ale (draft) that’s looking to find it’s way out of the bright-beer tank soon and into a glass.

Name game: Cricket Hill actually has less to do with the insect that stars in the brewery’s logo and more to do with the game cricket. The name is a reference to a vantage point for watching cricket matches in Australia. The cricket hill is the equivalent of the bleacher seats, but the spot where the social atmosphere and camaraderie is more inviting.

Wikognition, Part II

Recapping: The prefix “Wiki” made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (despite already earning a place in other reference works).

Why we cared: Because we needed a blog entry. No wait, um, because Flying Fish and Triumph have been immortalized in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. (Yes, it’s just Jersey beer trivia we’re fatuously falling all over here.)

How we tried to gin up the first take on this entry: Ask Wikipedia founder and Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales if he’s ever had a Jersey-made beer.

Two weeks later, we have an answer. (And we forgive Jimmy for the delay; he’s a busy guy. After all, he does occupy a spot on Time magazine’s list of 100 people who shape our world. He’s quite a sporting guy, too, for entertaining our query. Thanks, Jimmy.)

First off, Jimmy emails us that he does like beer, German beer, in fact, although he didn’t indicate a brand or style. Incidentally, he’s also learning German (of which we know a little: Bier schmeckt immer ausgezeichnet … we won’t swear to the correctness of our usage.)

Jimmy’s a traveling guy, too (he was in Japan when we emailed him last month), so of course he’s been to New Jersey.

But he notes that he’s never had a Jersey-made beer.

“Hmmmm. I think I am entirely unaware of the existence of New Jersey beers!” Jimmy wrote us.

Ouch.

OK, we’re being a little melodramatic. And truthfully, we can scare up a dozen born-and-raised New Jerseyans who, with a Coors Light in their grip, can say the same thing. That’s a bigger ouch, since New Jersey has a rather large résumé as a brewing state (just a lot of it is relegated to beer history now), inlcuding some award-winning craft and pub-brewed beers.

But Jimmy’s answer does play into a bigger picture. And that is the Garden State has a fairly low profile, comparatively, in the era of craft brewing. We're the Garden State, but not quite the beer garden state. That’s a conclusion we’re fairly certain will be underlined, figuratively speaking, when the Colorado-based Brewer’s Association unspools some extensive 2006 industry data this month.

But you don’t have to be big to be well known. And maybe we can make a convert out of Jimmy. Of course, we’re not implying that you FedEx Jimmy and the Wikimedia Foundation a mixed case of Jersey’s best. Let’s reiterate, we’re not suggesting that.

But if you infer it, who’s to throw cold water on a good idea?

Uh, maybe you should throw in some pork roll, too.

Two for the Show

Some quick notes from Sunday’s annual Brewer’s Plate festival in Philadelphia.

This is an affair that really underscores the inseparable tie between beer and food.

So if you weren’t one of the 1,000 people at the Reading Terminal Market savoring fine cheeses, seafoods, smoked meats and a some really kickin’ “beeramisu” at the third outing of this event, you’ll definitely want to put it on your calendar for next year.

Here’s why ...

The Brewer’s Plate (a fundraiser by nonprofit White Dog Community Enterprises) unites artisinal foods and dishes from some great Philly area restaurants with beers from craft brewers within a 150-mile radius of the city. Great food, great beer. Great expectations.

(This year, the festival featured 18 restaurants and 18 breweries, with each brewery and its two beers styles paired off with two different restaurants.)

But the event also makes a deeper statement about locally grown and produced food. And locally made beer. And that is, when you make those establishments your go-to purveyors, you create and nurture a community, not to mention giving an important boost to local economic development.

What’s that mantra about craft beers? Support your local brewery? Well, that’s part of what the Brewer’s Plate is saying.

And it’s one of the reasons we stepped across the Delaware to check out the pours from Jersey gems like Climax Brewing and Flying Fish and Triumph. (River Horse Brewing was also extended an invitation to the event but apparently could not make it.)

Some highlights of the Garden State at the event, a bit of what went on our plate and in our glass: Climax (Roselle Park) saw its very able ESB paired with a fantastic crab bisque from Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus, whose wonderfully spicy jambalaya was also matched up with the Farmhouse Summer Ale from Flying Fish (Cherry Hill). We’re big on spicy food, so this was a line we hit a few times more than we should admit.

(Climax’s Nut Brown Ale was paired with some excellent cured meats from London Grill. HopFish, the creamy IPA by Flying Fish, was served with pan-seared scallops from Patou.)

Triumph, which spans both sides of the Delaware, featured a dunkel larger (on tap at its New Hope, Pa., location) with pork loin and lentil pilaf from White Dog Cafe. (Triumph also poured its signature Bengal Gold IPA with a really tasty pulled pork sandwich.)

Great food and great beer always keep good company. Two for the show.

Calendar Note

Attention! Numbers to remember: 700, 23 and 5.

The 11th annual Garden State Craft Brewers festival will again dock at the pier in Camden, on June 23rd, marking the third consecutive year Jersey-made brews will be served on the flagship of Bull Halsey.

More on Bull Halsey in a second.

Right now, know this: Admission to the event aboard the USS New Jersey -- the floating museum at Camden's Delaware River waterfront -- this year will cost you 5 bucks more (this is not a bad thing, stay with us here) and attendance will be limited to 700 of you beer fans. (We’re not sure what the gate did last year, but capping the attendance is good, since it translates into shorter lines for necessities aboard ship, be they edibles or that ever-important line to the loo.)

So it’s going to be $35 to cruise with some of the Garden State’s best in brews in 2007. But don’t flinch. If you sailed with the Philly craft beer festival on March 3rd, you remember that passage was 40 bucks. And let’s face it, that was a pretty good time, followed by the Atlantic City festival a week later for a few bucks less.

So now it’s time for New Jersey beer’s annual showcase event. And for it, event organizers are putting the extra admission money where your mouth is. And by that we mean better food to go with the malt art you have come to expect from Jersey brewers.

So put on your sailing shoes (yes we’re Little Feat fans), the ship’s waiting for you.

(Last year the number for tickets was 866-877-6262 ext. 108. That’s the USS New Jersey’s line. We can’t say for certain it’s where to call now, but if we were starting somewhere, those are the digits we’d dial.)

About Bull Halsey: (we’re talking the Admiral Halsey here, so forget Uncle Albert and butter pies) … William Frederick “Bull” Halsey Jr. was born in Elizabeth, NJ, 125 years ago, and cut a distinguished jib as a US Navy admiral in World War II (a mere 60-plus years ago). The New Jersey was Halsey’s 3rd Fleet flagship during the battle of Leyte Gulf, the mother of all naval battles (so history tomes tell us).

All this has little to do with beer, but a lot to do with where you stand when you sip one aboard the ship. So when the time comes, tip your glass to the Bull and the Garden State.

Dismissed.